Yesterday evening at the “Towards a social science of web 2.0” conference we witnessed an extremely interesting ‘debate’ between Charles Leadbetter and Andrew Keen; the former advancing a number of arguments that web 2.0, user generated content and open source development are essentially positive and good for the development of knowledge on a number of levels. His arguments were fairly balanced and well structured presenting both how web 2.0 could have both positive and negative effects on quality, democracy and the equality of access to information, especially in the developing world. But it has to be said his argument presented a definite positive outlook.
Andrew Keen was essentially the pantomime villain and played up to the role with a passionate diatribe against user generated content and virtual worlds such as Second Life. His argument was that most of the content created by non-professionals, or amateurs is garbage and not worth paying for and that the availability of this free content will eventually endanger quality content provided by experts that we have traditionally paid for. He also has a big problem with San Francisco “hippy” counterculture and makes the point that while the founders and proponents of the current Web 2.0 phenomenon are essentially against government intervention they are also very pro-market by virtue of their libertarian worldview. His arguments as presented this evening did seem to jump around from one point to another, almost as some sort of taster to the arguments presented in his book which he shamelessly plugged during his speech. I am almost tempted to buy a copy to find out what he was actually trying to say but I’m not sure that I should for fear that I will have fallen into some sort of perverse marketing trap. He did present some interesting and positive opinions on the value of media literacy in response to a question from the audience; in that we need to educate our children on the interpreting of media to discern where there is bias, commercial interest or just plain incompetence.
A good point was made by a fellow delegate while chatting over dinner; that both speakers presented a number of obvious truths amongst their more questionable arguments and so it was fairly difficult to establish any truth from the polemic. Overall these were two excellent speakers at least from an ‘entertainment’ point of view. It’s only a shame that Charles Leadbetter had to get a train halfway through the session so we weren’t treated to a full debate between the two.
[…] Two of the web 2.0 conference and Kris has posted about some of yesterday’s sessions on the CLT Blog. Gwyneth and I are currently listening to ‘Making Friends with Jarvis Cocker’ by Dave […]
Andrew Keen is a keynote speaker at the Online Educa Conference in Berlin at the end of the year. I wonder what kind of reception he will have from the tech-savvy delegates?
Boos and hisses?
Jakob Nielsen, the web design guru web designers love to hate, takes the view that content-producers simply have to live with the fact that most stuff on the web is useless garbage, and rise above it. His metric for “rising above it” is rather obvious: a higher search-engine placement. But his analysis is penetrating nonetheless.
Essentially, authors (e.g. bloggers) should “avoid quickly written, shallow postings” and concentrate on writing in-depth material that keep readers coming back for more. He should know. He makes a living doing exactly that.
[…] Update: Jane has also been blogging from the conference and here’s a further posting. […]
That certainly worked for me. I published dozens of articles on web design in 2004/2005, which wasn’t link-bait, just me sharing from my experience and from the heart, and because of that (I believe) got my site to very high search engine rankings for various terms (like Web2.0 design).
As for whether Web2.0 has value, information can have value, or can be fluff. People have published fluff for years, as well as good, nutritious fare… It’s just easier now.